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Charlotte Mandell lives immersed in words and sound. She translates French to English; she loves music and books; her husband is the poet Robert Kelly; her spiritual practice, Tibetan Buddhism, involves extensive chanting. One of her favorite ways to relax is to feed songbirds, including a cardinal so tame he’ll hop up in her lap for a handout. Paradoxically, a quiet presence envelopes Mandell, perhaps an emanation from the heart of her spiritual practice, meditation that cultivates inner silence. Both an ear for the rhythms and music of language and a receptive quiet interlace with Mandell’s translation work.

Mandell’s facility with the French language took root during childhood summers in the French Alps. Her parents, Marvin and Betty Reid Mandell—both professors, activists, and founding editors of the journal New Politics—brought up their daughters in Boston, where Mandell attended Boston Latin High School. There, a young French teacher, Michèle Lepietrem, fired Mandell’s love of French, and she went on to major in French and film theory at Bard College, translating for her senior project a book of poems by Jean-Paul Auxeméry. She spent her junior year in Paris studying semiotics and film theory at Université de Paris III. Her published translations span French literature, from classic to contemporary, from fiction to poetry to nonfiction.

Years of esteemed obscurity ended with the English edition of Mathias Énard’s Goncourt Prize winning-novel Compass. Mandell’s translation, called “a feat of great beauty” by New York Journal of Books and “resoundingly successful” by The New York Times, put Compass on the short-list for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, co-awarded to author and translator.

The London festivities for MBI included bookstore appearances and a radio interview leading up to the live-streamed awards dinner—a daunting agenda for Mandell: “I like writing as other people,” she says. “I don’t think I have much to say as myself.” As it turned out, London “really was like a fairytale,” she said. Most rewarding, she got to meet Mathias Énard face-to-face after nearly 10 years translating his work.

On her return, we had a chance to talk about her translation process, and about Compass.

Like the narrator of Compass, Mandell carries her past in her surroundings, though with more joy than aching nostalgia. Her office is cluttered with memorabilia: many, many stones and crystals; bird feathers; sea shells; religious paraphernalia and images of Buddhist saints and gurus; family photos; love poems from her husband; souvenirs from her travels. Bookcases are packed with books in French and English, including her translations and her prized complete Le Grand Robert French Dictionary, in six volumes—though for work she uses a digital edition of Harrap’s Professional French-English Dictionary.

The Millions: What is your work rhythm? Do you have any rituals that help get you started or keep you going?

Charlotte Mandell: I work best in the late afternoon to early evening. I’m not a morning person, though I wish I were. No rituals except coffee or tea. Music, classical always, opera usually. Oh, actually, I do burn incense. I work a lot with aromatherapy, and it helps if I can smell something good while I’m working. Usually it’s Japanese cedar or sandalwood, and frankincense and myrrh.

TM: Are those scents in particular conducive to intellectual and creative work? Or is it just personal preference?

CM: I find those scents very calming and conducive to intense concentration. In ancient times, sandalwood was associated with the intellect. I also diffuse lemon oil to wake me up if I’m feeling sleepy.

TM: What are the “nuts and bolts” of your process? Do you write by hand or on computer? Go sentence by sentence? Paragraph by paragraph?

CM: I always work on the computer—it’s faster, and I try to work quickly—and I work sentence by sentence. I try not to think too much as I’m translating. “First thought best thought,” as Chögyam Trungpa said. [Chögyam Trungpa was one of the first Tibetan Buddhist gurus to teach in the West.] If I come across something particularly difficult or challenging, I leave it in bold face and come back to it later. Depending on what I’m working on, I try to translate about 10 pages a day. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but translating is mentally draining, and I can’t do much more than that if I want it to sound like good English. Then I read over what I’ve just translated, change it to sound more fluid. The next day I enter the changes into the text. When I finish the entire book I read over my translation very carefully and enter more changes. Then I read over that. I keep editing until I’m happy with it. Revision is an important process to me.

TM: How do you get a feel for a work as you embark on translating it?

CM: It usually takes me a week or two to really inhabit the voice and to feel it coming organically from within. Since I don’t read ahead, the voice has to sort of come on its own, as I translate. If I stay faithful to the text, and translate it as literally as possible, the voice usually comes on its own. Starting a translation is always the most difficult thing for me. It gets much easier when I’m about 50 pages in.

TM: Translating is a creative process, yet a translator is bound to adapt to each author’s work. For example, your translation of Marcel Proust wouldn’t be like your translation of Mathias Énard. How do you negotiate the unique demands of each work? Each author?

CM: I trust the text to tell me what it wants. I think the sign of a good translator is the lack of a particular “style.” You shouldn’t be able to guess who translated a particular work. Each work should sound unique and different. The less the translator inserts himself or herself into the work, the better it will sound. I try to let the work speak for itself.

TM: You’ve said that you translate as you read. Among ordinary readers, this is a very unusual experience: to translate while reading. Can you describe in some way the effect of it, how the words mix in your mind?

CM: When things are going well, you sometimes forget you’re translating—you feel as if you’re writing and reading at the same time, if that makes any sense. You become completely absorbed in the narrative until you’re inside the words and they’re flowing on their own. It’s a wonderful feeling, mesmerizing and addictive. I very often lose track of time when translating an absorbing book.

TM: How does being married to a poet inform your translation work?

CM: One of Robert’s favorite sayings is “All language is translation,” and I agree with him. Whenever we speak or write anything down, we’re translating our inner thoughts into language; we’re finding the right words to convey our thoughts. Robert’s command of language is extraordinary. He can read a number of languages—his first job was as a translator, actually. He was also raised with Latin and Greek, so we have similar backgrounds. My appreciation of beautifully wrought sentences and complex grammar is due in large part to Robert’s poetic use of language. He’s also my best editor. He reads all my translations and makes excellent suggestions to improve the English.

TM: You use the words “sound” and “voice” and “speak,” terms usually applied to spoken, not written, words. It brings to mind Karl Ove Knausgaard’s praise for Don Bartlett’s translation of My Struggle—that Bartlett captured the “voice” and “rhythm” of the original. For Knausgaard, that seems to be the most essential quality in a translation.

CM: I agree, the narrative voice is the most important aspect of a translation, especially in the cases of Zone and Compass, where the voice is all-pervading. Once you get the voice, everything else—rhythm, syntax, grammatical structure—falls in place and flows naturally.

TM: There’s the sound, the voice of the translation. And there’s the technical side, grammar, vocabulary, and such. But you’re also charged with capturing the meaning of the text, the author’s intentions. Do you ask the author what the work is about before you begin?

CM: I don’t ask the author anything at all! I just start right in, translating. That’s the way that works best for me—the work will tell me what it’s about. I love that feeling of the unknown before I translate a book. It’s what a reader feels when starting to read a book for the first time. You have no idea what’s in store for you, but you’re eager to find out. And invariably you find yourself changed by the time you reach the end.

TM: Some authors don’t get involved at all in the translation process; they just leave it up to the translator. Again, we can cite Knausgaard and Bartlett. Other author-translator pairs are much more enmeshed. Take, for example, Paul Celan and Michael Hamburger. Before their unfortunate falling out, they corresponded extensively. Can you describe your interactions, your process with Mathias Énard?

CM: I prefer to translate the whole book, then send the final draft to the author for comments or revision. Mathias doesn’t interfere during the translation process, and he doesn’t usually change very much. He trusts me, which is gratifying. Since he translates Arabic texts into French, he knows the issues involved in translation. If I have questions, I text him via WhatsApp or send him an e-mail, and he answers right away. Before meeting him, though, I was hesitant to bother him. Now that I’ve seen what a lovely and generous person he is, I won’t worry about disturbing him. I feel more free to ask him questions.

TM: How have other authors inspired your process?

CM: Working with Jonathan Littell was very instructive. He’s completely bilingual, raised speaking both French and English. Often he had a particular phrase in mind that he wanted to use in English, and though it diverged wildly from the literal French, it conveyed the same meaning. He helped me to be freer in my translations and to be unafraid of taking liberties when necessary.

TM: You share the practice of Tibetan Buddism, as it turns out, with Mr. Énard’s wife and with Sarah, a central character in Compass, and with me. In fact—I don’t know if you remember—we were on a retreat when I first learned that you’re a translator; you were working on Mathias Énard’s Zone. Did you advise or discuss Buddhism with Mr. Énard?

CM: I didn’t advise Mathias about Buddhist matters, but I did, with his permission, insert some Tibetan words for ceremonial instruments—radong [also transliterated rag-dung, a long horn somewhat like an alphorn] and gyaling [a double-reeded woodwind somewhat like an oboe]—into one of Sarah’s letters from India. I also added the word bardo after barzakh, since they both point to the same thing, and I thought those were words Sarah would use. [Tibetan bardo means, literally, interval; it usually refers to the phase from death to rebirth. Arabic barzakh means, literally, separation, and refers to a purgatorial phase from death to resurrection.]

TM: How does the practice of Buddhism affect your work?

CM: I find Buddhism very conducive to translation. When you meditate, you empty yourself of a “self,” a sense of ego, just as when you translate, you forget about yourself and become someone else: the narrator, the author’s voice. I think that’s why I enjoy translating so much—I like not being myself for long stretches of time.

TM: Do you identify with any of the characters in Compass or in other works you’ve translated?

CM: I felt very close to Sarah, and to her descriptions of her Buddhist practice—but then, I identify with all the characters I translate! When I translate a book I end up inhabiting the characters in a very intimate way, so that I often dream as them. This was a problem when I was translating The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell. I had recurrent dreams—nightmares, usually—as Max Aue, the Nazi narrator. With Franz Ritter [the narrator of Compass], it was more a case of inhabiting his melancholy state of mind, and identifying with his longing for Sarah, the long-lost beloved.

One of the perks of being a translator is that I get to inhabit a male character and see how his mind works. I think that might be one reason I enjoy translating male authors: it’s a window onto the Other, another way of not being my “self.”

TM: Before you left for London [for the 2017 Man Booker International awards], you were looking forward especially to meeting Mathias Énard for the first time.

CM: It’s such an interesting thing to meet for the first time an author whom you’ve been translating for almost 10 years—like meeting an old friend for the first time.

TM: What did you two talk about?

CM: We talked about lots of things: sailing, which we both grew up doing; the Lebanese restaurant Karakala in Barcelona, which Mathias co-owns; Buddhism, a little bit. Strangely, we didn’t talk about Compass.

TM: What do you think Compass is about?

CM: Compass is not really “about” any one thing. The pleasure in reading it comes from the language itself more than from the plot. For me, the experience was similar to that of reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. You see the workings of the narrator’s mind, how it jumps from one thing to another and back again, how it obsesses with one thing—Sarah—while recalling others—books, scholarly papers, music, faraway places. Mathias described the book once as “a Thousand Nights in One,” and I think that’s as good a description as any.

TM: At the end of the joint radio interview of you and Mathias Énard [BBC World Service, 12 June 2017], he said: “Compass is not a cemetery, you know. It’s not about lost places. I think it’s about the hope that we can have those places again.” For me, the book’s arc didn’t lead that way. I wouldn’t call Compass “dark” by any means, but hope was introduced late—not only in the romance but concerning the narrator’s health. So the book itself left me unconvinced by Mr. Énard’s statement. My take is that the book has an open and ambiguous trajectory, and a bittersweet ending—but let’s start with, “Compass is not a cemetery.”

CM: I think Mathias was saying in the interview that Syria isn’t a cemetery. We see the devastated parts of it, but there are still huge swathes of it rich in culture and alive with people.

TM: Do you agree with the rest of Mr. Énard’s statement? I guess my question is, where’s the hope, in Compass?

CM: There is an ancient saying, by Antisthenes of Greece, which I grew up memorizing: “To the wise nothing is foreign.” The hope in Compass is the hope of openness to the Other, a certainty that there is no “us” and “them,” there is only “we.” The East permeates and influences the West, and vice-versa. The hope lies in the narrator’s curiosity—which should be ours as well, in his thirst for knowledge. Compass is a love letter to the Other.

Jean Huets
is author of the forthcoming book With Walt Whitman: Himself, acclaimed as "a true Whitmanian feast” by Whitman scholar Ed Folsom. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and Civil War Monitor. Other published works include The Bones You Have Cast Down, a young adult novel set in late medieval Italy, and The Cosmic Tarot book, based on the tarot deck by German visionary artist Norbert Loesche. She co-founded Circling Rivers, an independent press dedicated to literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Visit her at jeanhuets.com.

For me, the best read of 2014 was Richard House’s thousand-page hardcover The Kills. I traveled a lot last year and I lugged The Kills around with me everywhere, undaunted by the fact that it was not built for shoving into an airplane seat-back pocket. It was the tome I could not put down, and it captured me so utterly that I begged off meal invites and bar get-togethers to finish it. I resented gigs because if I was reading my own work I wasn’t reading The Kills.

The Kills begins with a classic set-up: embezzled money, predatory contractors, and illegal U.S. waste burning sites in the Iraqi desert. A character known as “Sutler” (not his real name) serves as the front for a much larger conspiracy. From the literal and figurative wreckage of secret machinations, the novel explodes outward, exploring every bit of shrapnel and collateral damage, every consequence of the initial corruption. As Sutler flees the scene, other characters come into focus and then disappear into the anonymity from whence they came. Identities are abandoned, replaced with new fictions and mythologies about the self. The soldiers in charge of the burn pit reappear in a different context later in the novel. A book about serial killers in Italy — based on real events? — permeates all four sections and influences decisions by the soldiers back in civilian life.

House gives the reader exactly what we need to know about each character and situation through deft shifting between points of view, but no more than that. The overall structure has immense power as a result, thwarting normal reader expectations while showing great respect for the reader’s imagination. Comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, John le Carré, and Roberto Bolaño apply, but really are only a way of letting readers know the general territory they’re about to traverse. In short, the novel is surprising and unique — and, in the end, cathartic.

Published in the U.K. in 2013, The Kills was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It’s been highly lauded, and House, an accomplished filmmaker, has created audio/video extras that further illuminate the story. I interviewed House recently via email to explore some of the ideas in The Kills.

Jeff VanderMeer: In what ways does fiction infiltrate history? And, as individuals, are we fated to turn life into a story of some kind, whether we mean to or not? Is this different for U.K. writers?

Richard House: There’s a cultural difference in what happens in the U.S., the U.K., and Europe — in how writers do and don’t directly address social issues. I don’t want to generalise, but I do think U.S. writers allow themselves a broader platform in terms of subject, and also in how they approach form. It’s engaged and also playful. I’ve a lot of respect for that.

On a more fundamental level we (as in a generic ‘we,’ not just writers) have bad habits when it comes to translating life into any kind of narrative. I think this is almost automatic — and I really want to resist this — the way that fictive structures begin to shape and command history. The sense that events have a beginning, a middle, and an end is pernicious. It’s so deep we rarely question it. For me it comes from the way I was taught at school, from the way the media shape events, and even from the way my parents and peers speak about the world. There’s an artificiality to all of these stories, because they are always complete, and lessons are always learned. There’s always a point. I find this notion of closure really dangerous and it works against my experience of the world, of history — there’s a sense of putting something away, of learning from it, and of trying to establish one dominant way of regard. As if what we go through has a design, so that something occurs in the world for the explicit purpose of teaching us something, or proving a point. I find this artificial and frightening. It’s a form of consumption. It’s also, essentially, lazy. That three-part structure oversimplifies everything. I dislike the transformation of life or events into a received three-part act with an intensity.

That said, I think fiction is a useful, perhaps the most useful, way to digest the world, to consider ideas and positions that you otherwise couldn’t enter so willingly or freely — and fiction, like all disciplines, has certain necessary defining structures, genre to genre. Plus, it’s almost impossible not to narrate the world in some way, which is all about finding your feet, I suppose. I prefer fiction which struggles with topical events and wrestles with how to tell them — and that often comes through the lens of a specific genre.

JV: I don’t think of you as an absurdist in the way Franz Kafka was, but there is a streak of the irrational running through The Kills that struck me as very true to the way the world works. Where does this come from? I’m curious about your personal entry point or observation platform.

RH: For me this is a structural thing also. I want to resist that desire to round off, to teach, to give across an explicit position. In fiction there’s enough space to allow a reader to construct their own story. That roughness, of one thing knocking into another, is for me, pretty much how the world works.

I’m 53 and too much of a pragmatist to be truly absurd (although I’ve a weakness for humour which tends toward the absurd). Experience very rarely matches expectation (usually a very good thing, sometimes just awful) because at any given time the story or event which you think will play out in certain way, just isn’t the same story or event to anyone else. Experience is always oddly articulated — seldom ever what you expect. Things collide. Our perspectives are intimately subjective, and therefore always skewed. The good thing is that we’re not alone in this. Everyone bumps along, one way or another, all at different speeds. Most of the time there’s a sense that this or that is under our control, but that can fluctuate in a nano-second depending on a million other things. This goes back to your first question, how the world as we speak about it isn’t really the world that we experience.

JV: Are there parts of the novel you meant to be darkly funny?

RH: Definitely. Some of the core ideas — like building a city in the middle of nowhere — are to me rich with potential. I try to level that darker stuff as it can dominate — more stark than bleak, I guess. I particularly enjoyed writing the sections with Rem in Iraq, it’s not that these sections are funny, so much, but I liked writing about how men congregate, socialise, wrestle for position. Similarly with characters like Rike and her sister, there’s a competition and friendship that I hope comes through with a little more lightness than in other sections. There’s a wryness to the German Berens also. I’ve known many people like that who seem to closely observe themselves. In person I’m a lot more affable than my writing probably indicates.

JV: The section entitled “The Kill” and set in Italy is, to me, the center of the novel thematically and it radiates out fictional affects that impact the real world. There’s a potential resonance or connection with the parts set in Iraq in the depictions of war-time life as well. Were there other, less obvious connections, you want the reader to make?

RH: As I worked on the main body of The Kills, the idea that there would be a separate story which would somehow refocus ideas and issues in the other books became useful. I was very particular that The Kills would show an occupation from the occupiers perspective — my father was in the military, and this was my experience of Malta, Cyprus, Germany, where we had very limited interaction with any local population. In the Naples story, I was able to look, in a small way, at the other side of an occupation, and by setting that in Europe, and referring to WWII, I could give a perspective to what an occupation could mean, one that most of us could readily follow. What was happening in Iraq was immediate, we could see it in the news as it happened. But it was also removed, in happening in some remote place about which we have no proper or developed understanding. Iraq is somewhere else, foreign, distant. It’s almost a rule of action, that every country in which we have a conflict (I’m specifically thinking of the U.K. here) becomes abstract, and in some way, lesser. This is exactly what happened in Naples in 1943. If you look at a place as a theatre for war, then it makes it easier for us not to consider the reality of what is happening. That makes the consequences very hard, very bitter — and long term. I think the third book, “The Kill,” was a way of looking at this from a different angle.

Almost every character is out of water, in some circumstance they can’t control, to which they have to adapt, change, react. In “The Kill” the characters are outside in some way, being foreign, unable to speak a language, a sex worker, gay, not that these are equitable positions in any way, but they each add a level of complication to how they manage in the world. The same fish out of water issue stands for [several other characters].

“The Kill” works from a basic proposition. Two brothers deciding “what if.” There’s no consideration of what might happen afterward. In fact, there’s some delight for these brothers in how they leave behind them as big a mess as possible. I don’t believe this was our intention in Iraq, but it is the effect. There’s something deliberate and wilful about breaking a country apart and in attempting to restructure it as a marketplace — particularly a country which largely worked on traditional models of kinship and association. We demolished a country, every structure was devalued, disassembled, and when we came to reassemble it, we just couldn’t manage. Parts of Europe underwent similar destruction, except our obligation to restructure — propelled by a fear of communism — was followed through — for good or bad.

JV: I’ve heard “The Kill” was written first. Did the rest accrete around that? How much exploration was there structurally for you?

RH: I wanted to write something like Leonardo Sciascia’sEqual Danger, a short book that starts out as a crime novel but quickly unravels, and while seeming to be simple (the murder of high court judges) it addresses why these killings are happening, rather than who is doing the killing. Which is a smart distinction, and it opens up an ever-expanding problem. It’s a scary read, and there’s a film version by Francesco Rosi called Cadaveri Eccelente that was largely shot in Naples and is superb.

I took a side trip to Naples, thinking I’d write something lighter and quicker than usual, and ended up spending a considerable amount of time there, back and forth, over a couple of years. Whenever I met people, Italians, there would be this groaning realisation that if I was a writer, in Naples, then I’d probably be writing a crime novel or a thriller, and that the city was, and is, overburdened with these narratives. I set the book aside, and once the main story based on the Massive developed (the idea of a city being built in the desert in Iraq, and of focussing on contractors rather than the military) I included “The Kill,” the novel set in Naples, as a private reference. Not a joke exactly, but I didn’t want to let those ideas disappear.

JV: Did you realize after you’d finished The Kills that you might’ve written something that mimicked certain genres but didn’t really fulfill the trope-arc of those genres?

RH: I wanted to play with different kinds of narratives, partly because, as a reader, it sets up an expectation. As a writer it is hugely interesting to twist and articulate, and also frustrate those expectations. I’m a big fan of Wilkie CollinsThe Moonstone because almost too much is happening, it’s uncategorisable because it acknowledges different expectations — it’s a penny-thriller, a heist (sort of), a ghost story, a romance, a story divided between narrators and forms. Big fun. Thrillers and crime novels are also populated by different kinds of characters, which is for me their main pleasure. Mainstream literature can tend towards normalization — even when characters aren’t straight and white, they might as well be for all of the values represented. While thrillers and crime novels tend to freak difference and can be hugely problematic in how they stereotype (particularly women), they also show difference. I might not like some of the gay characters I read in crime novels, but once in a while there will be some humane, amazing character that I just won’t find anywhere else. I think I’m mimicking that kind of inclusion. I hope that those smaller characters (particularly in “The Kill”) matter. Part of how I worked their stories is that you’re engaged with a character only when and where they intersect the main narrative — more or less.

This might not be right, but when I read a thriller the characters, in some ways, fit the narrative, they work within that world, so much so that you’re right in that world with them, but they are clearly constructions. I’m aiming for that. There’s a real pleasure for me in seeing the artifice of something while you are also involved within it. A performer, Nancy Forrest Brown, used to perform these events where she would inhabit these characters, which was a kind of a drag act in a way. You’d be aware that this character was Nancy, but also, simultaneously, this character. I love that fluctuation. Fiction does that for me. Fake and real at the same time. Genre writing excels in this.

In terms of structure, I think readers are, or can be, highly sophisticated. As soon as a story starts we’re already working on the middle and the ending — and while we progress through a book tiny modifications or clarifications are happening to that overall plan. I prefer works which mess with this, and articulate themselves in unanticipated ways. Not fulfilling a genre’s expectation is going to frustrate a reader, and in some ways I take it for granted that a reader can complete a story arc without it needing to be spelled out. I have a particular dislike of being instructed, of being told how everything works, how I should feel, how I should think. Closure is an artifice, and it’s also the point where a writer can display their moral position or a neatly packaged world view — which is almost always problematic. I don’t read to be instructed, I read to discover and debate and to be challenged.

JV: Did you think that you were writing something metafictional just because a text embedded in your narrative replicates itself in people’s minds? I don’t personally see the novel as metafictional, but that might just be my world view intruding.

RH: Good question. There are certain pleasures here, some quotes from other writers that I love — in many senses the book is a map of writing that I value. There’s Sciascia, Highsmith, a bunch of others I forget. What I enjoyed in writing The Kills is that I’d given myself something huge to work across, and that some ideas could be re-articulated, and that other ideas could be set and returned to many hundreds of pages later. It’s tricky, because I’d like to set up a narrative where some associations or links are explicit, and others are implicit, without impeding the story. It would make me very happy if a reader started to make connections I hadn’t intended. I wanted to set up that potential. When I think about events in my own past I often have realizations — ‘oh, ok, that meant such and such,’ — notions which you revisit, revise, there’s the potential for this in a long-form narrative.

JV: There’s the novel in your head and then the novel on the page, and then the novel in the reader’s head. Have readers, generally, gotten what you were going for? The novel tends to keep making you re-evaluate how to read it from section to section.

RH: I have to be totally honest. Most discussions, frustratingly, are about the book’s size. It takes a certain temperament and intention to take on. We’re all watching that “% of pages read” progress bar on the kindle or iPad, which turns a novel into a challenge, not an experience, and takes out all of the pleasure. I’ve had a few people ask what happened to Eric, or Sutler, or Lila, and I love the idea that this question means that they could push the stories further for themselves.

I wanted a book that was packed with ideas and invention, without being too cumbersome. I also wanted a book which shifts in direction and has a logic that assembles itself as you read. I think I achieved that.

JV: What’s been the most interesting reader or reviewer response?

RH: A great deal of writing is about process, and about finding your way, so reviews are useful in helping me reflect back on what I’ve done. I think I was a little stunned once it was finished, so any kind of discussion helps me gain perspective, and I’m very grateful for that. It’s a scary prospect putting out something so huge and so involved. The book has received some passionate and particular support. As a very general rule, people who read a hell of a lot tend to get the overall project. People who don’t tend to read a huge amount think, erm, well, what kind of a thriller is this? Which makes the book a tough proposal. It makes me unspeakably happy when someone does get it. Some reviewers have asked questions about genre, which has been hugely productive for me to consider.

A good number of people think I invented the burn pits. Which sadly exist, and have caused ongoing health problems, perhaps even some deaths.

It’s not really that David had any answers for people. But he never stops taking his life seriously and he never stops taking the reader’s life seriously. And I think that’s the connection: you never stop mattering to him and he never stops mattering to himself.

There are many, many thousands of subcultures and scenes where writing is staged. There’s no dominant aesthetic, dogma, theory, or critic determining good, bad, mediocre, right, wrong. I like that. Who trusts anyone enough anyway?

When you write a memoir, you have an unwritten pact with the reader that you have to be expose even the unattractive aspect of your narrative. I mean really embarrassing things that make you squirm and might make the reader squirm.